Martin Kemp thinks he has 10 years left to live

Martin Kemp thinks he has 10 years left to live

Martin Kemp believes he only has 10 years left to live.

The 62-year-old musician was diagnosed with two brain tumours in the 1990s and though the benign growths were removed and haven’t returned, the Spandau Ballet star – who developed epilepsy as a side effect – thinks the medical scare will have had an impact on his life expectancy.

Asked by his son Roman how much longer he thinks he will be alive on their ‘FFS! My Dad Is Martin Kemp’ podcast, he said: “I’ll be really honest with you, 10 years.

“I don’t know how long I’ve got left but I will tell you, since I was the age of 34, when I went through all of that brain tumour scare, I spent two years of my life thinking I was going to die.”

Martin – who, as well as Roman, 31, also has 35-year-old daughter Harley with wife Shirlie – processed his thoughts about his mortality after his brain tumour diagnosis and he now views every day of his life as “a bonus”.

He said: “I think, after that, everything else, every day, every year, every month that I’ve lived, every experience that I’ve had has been a bonus.

“I was practically resigned to the fact that I was going to die, but I was quite happy with my lot, because I had lived the most incredible experiences.

“By the time I was 34 and I thought I was going to die, I spent two years thinking about it, I was quite happy, I thought, ‘If I go, do you know what? What a life’, and that was back then. So, every year that I live, every month that I’m alive now is like a bonus.”

But the ‘Gold’ hitmaker hopes his prediction is wrong.

He added: “I would be happy if I got to 80, that gives me 18 years!”

Martin previously told how accepting the role of Steve Owen on ‘EastEnders’ – who he played from 1998 to 2002 – helped with his recovery from brain surgery.

Speaking on the ‘Dish’ podcast in 2022, he said: “My brain still wasn’t working properly from the operation. To the point where sometimes if I wanted to walk left, I would walk right, or like I couldn’t think about putting things in order, or anything like that.

“Learning lines was just way out there. When ‘EastEnders’ was offered to me it was a chance for me to get over it, so it wasn’t just me taking EastEnders on because I thought yeah, it was a good gig – it was me trying to get my life back together.”